Search Results for: Love

They Found Love, Then They Found Gender

Longreads Pick

A story of love and transitioning.

Source: Matter
Published: Oct 22, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,953 words)

For the Love of Duke

Longreads Pick

A West Virginia woman falls in love with a mysterious man online, then gets roped into a global scam.

Source: Wired
Published: Oct 9, 2015
Length: 23 minutes (5,982 words)

Hemingway in Love

Longreads Pick

A.E. Hotchner reveals the story of when his friend Ernest Hemingway was in love with two women simultaneously.

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Sep 23, 2015
Length: 19 minutes (4,984 words)

The Ghostly Love Triangle of the Mission School

Longreads Pick

Married artists Margaret Kilgallen and Barry McGee were progenitors of San Francisco’s Mission School movement. After Kilgallen died at 33, Clare Rojas married her husband, adopted her daughter, and inherited an artistic legacy.

Source: The New Yorker
Published: Aug 10, 2015
Length: 23 minutes (5,950 words)

Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making

Longreads Pick

Maggie Nelson blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning and limitations of language, love, and gender in this excerpt from “The Argonauts.”.

Source: Longreads
Published: May 1, 2015
Length: 16 minutes (4,137 words)

Love, Identity, and Genderqueer Family Making

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Maggie Nelson | The Argonauts | Graywolf Press | May 2015 | 17 minutes (4,137 words)

Published to great acclaim earlier this year, The Argonauts blends memoir and critical theory to explore the meaning and limitations of language, love, and gender. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes the author’s account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, offers a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making. 

A note: In the print edition of The Argonauts, attributions for otherwise unattributed text appear in the margins in grayscale. We’ve tried to recreate those marginal citations here. However, due to the limitations of digital formatting, if you are viewing this excerpt on a mobile device the citations may appear directly above the quotations, as opposed to alongside them.

***

October, 2007. The Santa Ana winds are shredding the bark of the eucalyptus trees in long white stripes. A friend and I risk the widowmakers by having lunch outside, during which she suggests I tattoo the words HARD TO GET across my knuckles, as a reminder of this pose’s possible fruits. Instead the words I love you come tumbling out of my mouth in an incantation the first time you fuck me in the ass, my face smashed against the cement floor of your dank and charming bachelor pad. You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.

Read more…

‘Why Don’t Pure Loves Meet?’ On the Radio in Afghanistan

Photo: Lig Ynnek

In this beautiful piece from Matter, Mujib Mashal takes the reader to the Afghani airwaves, into the hearts of its listeners. From the complications of arranged marriage to online dating woes, the youth of Afghanistan have a lot on their minds. DJ Ajmal Noorzai solemnly shares their stories on his program, The Night of Lovers. 

When the show first aired, callers were reticent to speak honestly. But slowly, with Ajmal’s guidance, they opened up — so much so that stories had to be debated before they were aired. In one, a young girl named Sameera sobbed as she recounted falling for a man other than her arranged spouse. Honor is everything in Afghan society; it is a highly shameful act for a female member of the family to engage in relations of any kind with a man before marriage. Producers had to be careful to safeguard Sameera’s identity.

Sameera had been engaged to a man for three years; he was a good man. But no matter how hard she tried “to send her heart his way,” she couldn’t. Her family — her sister, her brother — tried to help her forget the man she truly loved, without success. She felt trapped. “I just wanted to share this with the listeners. I am a very pained girl. Good night to you — and I pray that those who have not been united with each other, they meet again. God protect you.”

What struck Ajmal about Sameera’s story wasn’t just that she was speaking honestly, openly, about a taboo subject. It was that she was connecting to thousands of others united in pain and heartache. Afghanistan is a nation of suppressed pain, in its every color and form. A nation awash in PTSD. We have seen such extremes that what elsewhere would draw the attention of psychologists here is considered normal. Pain is something to be dealt with in solitude, to be “only shared with the mirrors,” as the poet Qahar Asi put it.

Read the story

This Queer Hoosier Loves Her Home State

Photo: Matt B.

Don’t punish Indiana’s citizens for one governor’s decision, Ashley C. Ford implores. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act, supported almost exclusively by Governor Mike Pence, doesn’t reflect her Indiana:

“I don’t know every Hoosier, but I can’t find one who supported the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Everyone I know—myself included—has been speaking out, marching, letter-writing, doing whatever we can think of to get this bill repealed or tweaked.”

Ashley is especially invested in Indiana. It’s where she’s from, her home state. It’s where she came to terms with her own sexuality, kissed a girl, and found a supportive LGBTQA community:

I only moved an hour down the road to Indianapolis, but it was a new world for me, a chance to reinvent myself. Here, I casually mentioned my bisexuality to people who didn’t blink an eye. I attended Pride and patronized gay and lesbian bars. For years I’d been speaking about equal rights and human rights, but in Indy I began to let myself write about and speak publicly about my queer identity.

I didn’t leave Indiana because I didn’t feel safe or loved or understood. Yes, there were issues with my family, but I was still in Indiana when I found my community, and when I found acceptance. I feel like I lived two lives in Indiana: one that got me, and one I never gave the chance to get me. But that doesn’t seem very rare. It seems like the complicated relationship most people have with their hometowns.

Read the story

On Cancer: ‘Love wasn’t something I felt anymore. It was just something I did’

Photo by Tara Hunt.

Nicole was thirty-four, and the doctor had been direct: “It’s everywhere,” he said. “Like somebody dipped a paintbrush in cancer and flicked it around her abdomen.” I staggered down a hallway and then collapsed. I remember the tile, close to my face, and then watching it retreat as my best friend picked me up from the floor. His name is Dane Faucheux, and I remember noting, even in the midst of a mental fugue: Dane’s a lot stronger than I realized.

Matthew Teague’s wife Nicole was only 34 years old and dying of cancer. From Esquire, this is the story of how a friendship, deep, true, and strong, became prophylactic against the dizzying litany of indignities involved in a slow, painful death.

Read the story

The Boy Who Loved Transit

Photo via mtaphotos (Edited)

Jeff Tietz | Harper’s | May 2002 | 35 minutes (8,722 words)

 

This essay by Jeff Tietz first appeared in the May 2002 issue of Harper’s and was later anthologized in The Best American Crime Writing: 2003 Edition. Tietz has written for Rolling Stone, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Livingston Journalism Award. His work has appeared in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Writing, Best American Business Writing, and The CAFO Reader. Our thanks to Tietz for allowing us to reprint it here. For those interested in an update on Darius McCollum’s story, see this 2013 The Wall Street Journal piece (subscription req’d).

***

Before leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in Crown Heights, on the morning of his nineteenth arrest for impersonating and performing the functions of New York City Transit Authority employees, Darius McCollum put on an NYCTA subway conductor’s uniform and reflector vest. Over his feet he pulled transit-issue boots with lace guards and soles designed to withstand third-rail jolts. He took transit-issue work gloves and protective goggles. He put a transit-issue hard hat on his head. In his pockets he carried NYCTA work orders and rerouting schedules and newspaper clippings describing his previous arrests: for driving subway trains and buses and various other vehicles without authorization, possessing stolen property, flagging traffic around NYCTA construction sites, forging documents. He also carried a signed letter on NYCTA letterhead:

To: All Concerned Departments

From: Thomas Calandrella Chief Track Officer

Re: Darius McCollum Effective this date of January 10, 2000, Darius McCollum is a member of a special twelve member Special Study Group; and will analyze the operations of track safety and track operations. SSG will report directly to this office and will be issued all related gear for the respected purposes of this department and will receive assistance of any relating department.

To his belt Darius clipped a flashlight and a key ring the size of a choker. From this ring six smaller rings hung like pendants. Along the curves of the small rings, 139 keys climbed symmetrical and fanlike. Each key granted access to a secure area of the train, bus, or subway system of the New York City Transit Authority. The collection was equivalent to the number of keys an employee would acquire through forty years of steady promotions. Just before he left the apartment, Darius picked up an orange emergency-response lantern.

Six weeks earlier, Darius had been paroled from the Elmira Correctional Facility, near Binghamton, New York, where he had served two years for attempted grand larceny—”attempted” because he had signed out NYCTA vehicles for surface use (extinguishing track fires, supervising maintenance projects) and then signed them back in according to procedure. Darius has never worked for the NYCTA; he has never held a steady job. He is thirty-seven and has spent a third of his adult life in prison for victim-less offenses related to transit systems. Read more…